I downloaded it earlier this week and installed it today, and although it looks good there have been a couple of problems (not necessarily bugs).

When I was trying to use the text installer and configuring the timezone, the place selector stalled on the As and I ended up choosing Johannesburg (Africa) instead of London for my timezone, and so far I haven't been able to get networking going so I can't get online with it yet.

A quick update: I booted Vector 7.1 RC1 up again today and oddly my internet connection worked even though the network icon on the desktop showed a cross, indicating that networking had been disabled. Still, all's well that ends well...

On another note, swap wasn't enabled by default when I booted it up as it is in other distros I've tried, so I had to set it manually, and there was also no option to enable swap when I installed Vector (or to set the other partitions to load on bootup), even though other distros I've seen which are based on Slackware, such as Salix and Absolute, do have these steps.

It's as though a decision was taken to truncate the text-based installation process in the interests of brevity.

Sorry, but IMO there's still work to be done before it's ready for release.

Want to install on samsung RF511 and lenovo n586, the samsung being my main machine (vl 7,0) and both being, I think, bought in 2011. Both have big hard drives and the samsung has been acting up of late, particularly when trying to save files. Lenovo runs salix and is kept as emergency backup (not used).

first tried samsung with usb stick formatted as ext4 I think. Tried advanced as I want to keep partitions. Could not get out of little windows which first show up. Finally figured out that pushing "escape" would let me go to next window. Then after the select "time" window, "next" did not work but I was dumped off to the root prompt. So I reformatted the usb drive to fat32 with gparted and loaded vl 7.1 on it again, using unebootin. Noticed it said corrupted, "run xfs_repair" as it was coming up, but it went to windows anyway. Did not need to use "escape" to go from one window to next, but had same problem: Dumped me off to root after "time" window. Said corrupted.. Don't know how to use xfs_repair but tried xfs_repair -n and that didn't work. Think I may have had to unmount something first.

So tried install on lenovo and before first window it said corrupted data. Same result whether usb stick was ext4 or fat 32. Tried non-gui install, with same result (corrupted)..Lenovo works fine on salix, so I doubt anything is corrupted.

Looked around for a blank cdrom, thinking I would try putting VL 7.1 RC1 on it and load from cd but can't find one. Will pick some up next time I'm at the store and, meanwhile, think about it. I can always use my old IBM thinkpad t60p, now loaded with debian. Far as that goes, I usually like the thinkpad's square screen better than wide-screen anyway.

VL 7.1 RC1 loaded fine on my lenovo from CD. However, CD didn't help samsung. Did same thing (blew up after the select lilo screen). Hard drive is probably fried. I have another but ill probably wait until 7.1 final to try it.

On the Lenovo, kde basically doesn't work. Seems find and all that but, for example, gslapt errors out as do a lot of the other programs.

Lyx and etmtk installed fine, though I had to use xfce rather than kde, and I had to update a couple of the etmtk dependencies. Yate still won't work, from VL repository or slackbuilds.org. I believe it has to somehow be yate-qt rather than yate, but, for the life of me, can't find a yate-qt to download.